Beyond anywhere you might be now-beyond
the debris of all those elsewheres and whereabouts you
promised yourself you would inhabit if you had the time and
money (as if you could will it … as if you knew the direction),
children open their wide morning eyes and wade chest high into
stone skipping days, into neck deep light, into constant
conversations that bleed the mornings amber. Continue reading →

In The Stone Skippers, Burgham launches dazzling poems that explore the central core of our humanity upon the Canadian literary landscape.

The poems examine how love is a territory we map with little skill. The speaker returns again and again to the distances we set up or have imposed upon ourselves by relationships of desire and love, all against the motif of conversations inner conversations, day-to-day conversations, one-sided conversations, unfinished and halting conversations.

Ian Burgham is an associate of the League of Canadian Poets. In 2004 he won the Queens University Well-Versed Poetry Prize. He is a graduate of both Queens University and the University of Edinburgh, and has lived for extended periods in various parts of the world. He served as a senior editor at Canongate Publishing in Edinburgh during the early 1980s. His poems have been published in a number of literary journals and magazines including dANDelion, Queens Quarterly, Scottish Arts Journal, Harpweaver, and the Literary Review of Canada. Burgham has had one poetry book published in the United Kingdom: Confession of Birds, (2003 chapbook). His first full collection of poems, The Stone Skippers, will be published in Australia and New Zealand by Sunline Press, Perth (introduction by Newcastle Prize winning poet, Roland Leach) and, in the UK by MacLean Dubois Publishers in February 2007 (Introduction by novelist and poet, Alexander McCall Smith). He is currently working on his third collection. Ian works as a volunteer to further the efforts of the Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry. He is an adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Queens University.